NEPA

15 posts

GHG Impacts From Coal Mining: Federal Assessment Critiqued By Sabin Center

Last week marked an important shift in executive policy on fossil fuel leasing: the Interior Department announced a moratorium on new leases for coal mined from federal lands, pending a comprehensive reexamination of the decades-old coal leasing program. Interior will prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) to examine how […]

Public Meeting in Georgia to Discuss NEPA Requirements for Oil and Gas Projects

Jessica Wentz Associate Director and Fellow Earlier this month, I visited Savannah, Georgia to talk with concerned citizens about the environmental review process for oil and gas infrastructure in their state. My presentation focused on how the public can use the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to ensure that agencies […]

Federal Agencies Acknowledge the Importance of Preparing Infrastructure for Climate Change But Rarely Act on Climate Projections

Jessica Wentz Associate Director and Postdoctoral Fellow Although it has become more common for agencies in preparing environmental impact statements (EISs) to acknowledge the impacts of climate change on a project and its affected environment, it is still quite rare for agencies to accurately incorporate this knowledge into final decisions […]

Final Programmatic EIS Establishes Plan for Southwestern Solar Development

By Katee Kline, Legal Intern On July 24, the Department of the Interior released a final programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) identifying prime areas for solar development, approving seventeen large-scale energy projects on public lands, and outlining the procedure for approval of similar projects.  The PEIS, authored by the DOI’s Bureau […]

Analysis of Environmental Impact Statements Shows Widely Varying Treatment of Climate Change Risks

By Patrick Woolsey, CCCL Intern U.S. Government agencies have begun to incorporate consideration of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions into the environmental impact statements (EISs) which they are required to produce under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). However, federal agencies have developed widely varying procedures for addressing the […]